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“... in fiction, or reality versus fiction. Take the many articles about the ‘true’ writings of Karl Ove Knausgaard, or the huge amount of attention paid to David Shields’s polemic Reality Hunger. Time and again we hear about a new desire for the real, about a realism which is realistic set against an avant-garde which isn’t, and so on. It’s ...”

“... left, which in the aftermath of the Holocaust had been largely supportive of the Jewish state. The French youths who had declared ‘we are all German Jews’ after the arrest of the student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit, whose German Jewish parents had fled to France in 1933, were now protesting against the Israeli occupation – Cohn-Bendit among ...”

“... as ‘a poet who had the bad luck to be mistaken for a philosopher’. He also took an interest in Karl Jaspers, contributing to a translation of a recent treatise on Allgemeine Psychopathologie (his German was quite good) and taking to heart its main message: that psychology is not so much a medical as a philosophical discipline, in which individual ...”

“... Fehlleistung should be translated as ‘faulty achievement’ accords reasonably well with the French, Italian and Spanish translations of this word (acte manqué, atto mancato and acto fallido). Sometimes his arguments for retranslation are hardly compelling, as when he claims that The Interpretation of Dreams is ‘by no means a felicitous ...”

“... agreement between Halley and Laplace was ruined and nationalistic passions inflamed: Laplace was French and Adams English. Parity was restored when the Frenchman Charles Delaunay showed that Laplace’s calculation did indeed account for half the effect and that tidal friction could account for the rest. The Moon raises tides on the oceans directly below ...”

“... Kaiser and thus, presumably, earned the right of any survivor to a home fit for a hero. In 1914 Karl Liebknecht told the German labour movement that ‘the main enemy is at home.’ In our own time the British Tories came to the same conclusion by a different route. We may thank Lawson for making this connection in its most crass and insulting form.The idea ...”

“... its population by a million or two. The clear lineal descent of this policy from Japanese and French imperialism, the relentless campaign of lying and falsification by which it was justified, and the coercion and bullying of those brave Americans who resisted it, made the Vietnam War a rather urgent cause for those of us who were essentially politicised ...”

“... Well, Jurek Becker’s Jacob the Liar and Night – not the book by Elie Wiesel, who wrote in French, but a vengeful novel by Edgar Hilsenrath. Filkins’s point about the anti-Semitism of postwar German-language publishing would have been stronger if he’d noted that only one of his Germans, Hilsenrath, was born in the Reich. Becker was born in ...”

“... and forming the first mass movements in support of democracy. The third book Rogan discusses is Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, published in 1944. The book sought to explain why a long period of peace and stability in Europe ended suddenly and violently with the First World War and the Great ...”

“... for other protagonists in the genre, whether it be the prototypical Odysseus, the 16th-century French peasant Martin Guerre, who has to displace an impostor, or Balzac’s Colonel Chabert, who is received so badly that he relinquishes all claims, including to his own name: ‘But now I am buried underneath the living, under papers, under acts, under the ...”

“... khedive of Egypt, theoretically a subject ruler of the Ottoman Empire, invited the British and the French to set up a debt commission, staffed by European officials, with extensive quasi-sovereign powers to tax, spend and direct Egyptian revenue, and to supervise debt. European involvement in the Egyptian economy steadily increased: the American economist ...”

“... Allan Gray (whose real name was Józef Żmigrod); the German art director Hein Heckroth; and the French and German cinematographers Georges Périnal and Erwin Hillier. The company also had the financial backing of J. Arthur Rank, a wealthy Methodist industrialist from Yorkshire: ‘Not since the time of the Renaissance popes has a group of artists found a ...”

“... Weimar in partibus. There are emigrations and emigrations. Chateaubriand elegantly described the French emigration of the 1790s, at Coblenz, where it reproduced all of the fantasies and the incompetence, in heightened degree, of the Ancien Régime, before petering out, in the next two decades, into a set of ...”

“... gods.’ Hrabal, who was born in 1914 in Moravia, started writing poems under the influence of French Surrealism. The poems quickly squared their shoulders and became paragraphs: prose poems, epiphanic jottings, broken anecdotes. The Prague Revue (No. 5) recently printed a number of these early poems, written in the 1940s, and many of them are touched with ...”

“... his initial presentation of the project, was an inventory of all those realms of remembrance where French identity could be said to have symbolically crystallised.Under this capacious heading, 127 essays – most of high quality – surveyed a bewildering potpourri of subjects, ranging from such obvious items as the Tricolour, the Marseillaise and the ...”